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In a past life I helped a company create a new proposal department. The company was part of a billion dollar government contractor. They had a history of business units not accepting process guidance from the proposal group. It’s not an uncommon problem. Does it sound familiar? When people choose to opt in, you start the proposal with half of the battle for process acceptance already won. The old proposal group kept saying things like, “If they’d only submit their drafts on time” or “if

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Week 1 Discussion For the Week 1 discussion, complete your initial post by Tuesday at 11:59 PM ET and respond to a minimum of two posts by Thursday at 11:59 PM ET. This week’s discussion: Introduce yourself and your interest in the proposal profession. Respond using an outline format that you create based upon these instructions. Include: 1.       Your name 2.       Where you grew up 3.       What was your favorite course in school and why? 4.       Do you enjoy wri

For the Week 1 discussion, complete your initial post by Tuesday at 11:59 PM ET and respond to a minimum of two posts by Thursday at 11:59 PM ET. This week’s discussion: Introduce yourself and your interest in the proposal profession. Respond using an outline format that you create based upon these instructions. Include: 1.       Your name 2.       Where you grew up 3.       What was your favorite course in school and why? 4.       Do you enjoy writing and project manage

You can build quality into every activity that’s part of producing a proposal. But you can’t do it with milestone based reviews. With Proposal Quality Validation the emphasis changes from when to review, to what you review.  You can apply quality validation to more than just the document. Try taking a deep look at the risks and issues you face in every activity related to producing the proposal. Don’t just think in terms of checklists. Think in terms of what needs to be done correctly to wi

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One of the things that I’ve learned by authoring the MustWin Process and having personally been involved with countless process implementations at companies reengineering their proposal processes is that context matters. Much of what goes into winning proposals occurs outside of the process.  Consider how decisions get made and what expectations people have outside of the proposal. How is the proposal impacted by the company’s strategic planning and positioning efforts? Who sets quality s

How do you know if your proposal is any good? How do you know if it reflects what it will take to win? Is it just a matter of opinion? Whose opinion? How you do break the cycle of inconsistent and ineffective reviews that do more harm than good? Why this goal is important The way most companies review their proposals is broken. Conducting a proposal review with little or no preparation beyond printing the proposal and a copy of the RFP can be worse than not doing any review at all. You sho

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Many proposal problems have more to do with the people involved than the document. Creating a document is easy. Creating a document against a deadline with a bunch of other people all with their own ideas about creating a document is hard. How do you get everyone to agree on: Who does what? What their expectations of each other are? What the goals are? How to maximize win probability and ROI? How to do things during proposal development? What to

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We've been at this since 2001 and have published over 867 articles and 532 proposal recipes. But the articles we wrote in 2018 include some of the most useful and insightful that we've ever published. That is, if you look past the titles. The titles don't do the practical value of the content the justice it deserves. That's something I'm going to have to work on in 2019.  In 2018, we had over 210,000 visitors. That's a lot of people interested in winning proposals. Thank you for all that at

In order to implement Proposal Quality Validation, you need to plan a set of reviews to validate that your quality criteria have been fulfilled. But how many reviews do you need to achieve this? What you review is more important than how you review it, or even how many reviews you have. You should have enough reviews to cover all of your quality criteria without overloading your reviewers. You can’t have too many reviews, provided the reviews are small, focused, and support rather than impe

It’s important to be able to define proposal quality if you want to make sure that the proposal you develop reflects it. We define it as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. We define what it will take to win as part of our process, reaching all the way back before the RFP is released so that the questions we ask and information we gather enable us to say what it will take to win. We use Proposal Content Planning to bring what it will take to win together with the other things

It’s important to be able to define proposal quality if you want to make sure that the proposal you develop reflects it. We define it as a proposal that reflects what it will take to win. We define what it will take to win as part of our process, reaching all the way back before the RFP is released so that the questions we ask and information we gather enable us to say what it will take to win. We use Proposal Content Planning to bring what it will take to win together with the other things

First you need to qualify it. Qualifying a lead means making sure that it’s worth pursuing. Is it real? Is it big enough? Is it the right type? Is it worth pursuing? Can you win it? But the truth is that you should be qualifying the lead continuously. You should be constantly proving that the lead is worth pursuing.  Once you qualify the lead, you need to prepare to win it. This is a combination of things you need to do and things you need to fin

Topics might include... Developing capabilities that differentiate your company and give customers a reason to care about you Building growth into your corporate culture Improving your competitiveness How your approach to risk can save or hurt your company Using oversight to improve your customer relations and protect your past performance  Organizing to improve collaboration and decision making Competing with the big dogs

People don’t flourish on their own. People are the most successful at winning business when they understand what is expected of them and know how to define success for their tasks. A little motivation helps, but it’s not the only thing required. Every assignment should be wrapped with guidance and tools that enable your people to know whether they are doing things correctly. And this should not simply take the form of other people. The model of people telling people what to do and then subjectiv

If you get this one step right, everything else will fall into place. And it's not what you think it is. It's not the preparing, the planning, the writing, or the reviewing of the draft proposal. It’s not that those things aren’t important. It’s just that there is one moment in time that pretty much seals your proposal's fate. Most companies don’t even do it. And those that do often fail to make the most of it. All other steps in your proposal management process depend on getting this one rig